Yeah; I worked on a Norwegian Internet Index, which had its own search engine (our own crawler and all) back in the mid-late 90s, so I used search engines a lot back then.

Now, from my memory, AltaVista and HotBot? were the key go to players outside of Yahoo. Google was a tiny fringe player at first, until, well of course we all know how that went. So AltaVista was definitely a key player at a very significant time in Internet history.